The Satanic Verses

peaks as well as physical ones: like opera. That’s what makes them so awesome. Nothing but the giddiest heights. A hard trick to pull off, though.’ Allie had a way of switching from the concrete to the abstract, a trope so casually achieved as to leave the listener half-wondering if she knew the difference between the two; or, very often, unsure as to whether, finally, such a difference could be said to exist.
    Allie kept to herself the knowledge that she must placate the mountain or die, that in spite of the flat feet which made any serious mountaineering out of the question she was still infected by Everest, and that in her heart of hearts she kept hidden an impossible scheme, the fatal vision of Maurice Wilson, never achieved to this day. That is: the solo ascent.
    What she did not confess: that she had seen Maurice Wilson since her return to London, sitting among the chimneypots, a beckoning goblin in plus-fours and tam-o’-shanter hat. – Nor did Gibreel Farishta tell her about his pursuit by the spectre of Rekha Merchant. There were still closed doors between them for all their physical intimacy: each kept secret a dangerous ghost. – And Gibreel, on hearing of Allie’s other visions, concealed a great agitation behind his neutral words –
if you say it, then I know –
an agitation born of this further evidence that the world of dreams was leaking into that of the waking hours, that the seals dividingthe two were breaking, and that at any moment the two firmaments could be joined, – that is to say, the end of all things was near. One morning Allie, awaking from spent and dreamless sleep, found him immersed in her long-unopened copy of Blake’s
Marriage of Heaven and Hell
, in which her younger self, disrespectful of books, had made a number of marks: underlinings, ticks in the margins, exclamations, multiple queries. Seeing that she had awoken, he read out a selection of these passages with a wicked grin. ‘From the Proverbs of Hell,’ he began.
‘The lust of the goat is the bounty of God
.’ She blushed furiously. ‘And what is more,’ he continued,
‘The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell
. Then, lower down the page:
This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment
. Tell me, who is this? I found her pressed in the pages.’ He handed her a dead woman’s photograph: her sister, Elena, buried here and forgotten. Another addict of visions; and a casualty of the habit. ‘We don’t talk about her much.’ She was kneeling unclothed on the bed, her pale hair hiding her face. ‘Put her back where you found her.’
    I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing
. He riffled on through the book, and replaced Elena Cone next to the image of the Regenerated Man, sitting naked and splay-legged on a hill with the sun shining out of his rear end.
I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise
. Allie put her hands up and covered her face. Gibreel tried to cheer her up. ‘You have written in the flyleaf: “Creation of world acc. Archbish. Usher, 4004 BC. Estim’d date of apocalypse,, 1996.” So time for improvement of sensual enjoyment still remains.’ She shook her head: stop. He stopped. ‘Tell me,’ he said, putting away the book.

    Elena at twenty had taken London by storm. Her feral six-foot body winking through a golden chain-mail Rabanne. She had always carried herself with uncanny assurance, proclaiming her ownership of the earth. The city was her medium, she could swimin it like a fish. She was dead at twenty-one, drowned in a bathtub of cold water, her body full of psychotropic drugs. Can one drown in one’s element, Allie had wondered long ago. If fish can drown in water, can human beings suffocate in air? In those days Allie, eighteen-nineteen, had envied Elena her certainties. What was
her
element? In what periodic table of the spirit could it be found? – Now, flat-footed, Himalayan veteran, she mourned its loss. When you have earned the high horizon it isn’t easy to go back into your box, into a narrow island, an eternity of anticlimax. But her feet were traitors and the mountain would kill.
    Mythological Elena, the cover girl, wrapped in couture plastics, had been sure of her immortality. Allie, visiting her in her World’s End
crashpad
, refused a proffered